Last night, Kanye West’s Glow in the Dark tour rolled through Paris with the legendary Roots crew opening. Manager Rich Nichols reached out to me the day of, and I made the show plus the Champagne afterparty back in the bowels of Bercy stadium. It was a throwback evening, totally reminiscent of so many others from back in the go-go 90s, when killer music, free drinks, celebs and flirtatious freestyle conversation were weekly affairs in my life. Not that I don’t love changing diapers. (snicker)

I’ve seen the Roots too many times to count, and matter of fact, Thursday night was my third time this year. (No. 1, the Apollo Theater in February; no. 2, Rock en Seine three months ago.) I still miss Hub, and I still don’t get the sousaphone guy, but the Roots never, ever disappoint. Their cover of Kool G Rap’s “Men at Work” always gets me thinking: “Black Thought’s rapid-fire flow is hard enough to follow for an English-speaking audience; what are the French getting out of it? Do they even know it’s G Rap?” Their tour bus flipped the night before, and it’s a blessing that the Roots weren’t hurt and still soldiered through on some “the show must go on.” And I hear the group is about to be Jimmy Fallon’s house band when he takes over for Conan O’Brien, shades of Branford Marsalis and The Tonight Show.

(Side note: Black Thought and I had, let’s say, “a girl in common” back in those late 90s who we never discuss when we speak. I always get to wondering if he still remembers. There was a lot of that going around then. I don’t attract groupies, but somehow some of the women I was with had also been linked to Prince Paul, DJ Premier, Aaron McGruder and others. But anyway.)

Kanye did his thing. I’ve been getting this question a lot – I guess it’s a debate going on right now – but for the record, I’m not mad at Ye singing. He closed with “Love Lockdown,” one of the year’s best singles. (And by the way, the Roots’ Rising Down is one of 2008’s best albums.) I’d seen him at Le Zénith years ago but never got to hear him do Graduation material; I prefer Late Registration much better. Le Zénith seats 6,000, but Bercy was much more like Madison Square Garden.

Claire Sulmers of The Fashion Bomb blog schemed with me using our backstage passes to rush Kanye’s “private” Champagne mixer afterwards, where a splendid time was guaranteed for all. Ye told me he’s not intentionally after a Grammy this time with 808s & Heartbreak, as he tried to figure out whether Claire and I were “together.” Beer, cham, wine… I’m still nursing a hangover. I’d do it all over again.

Labelle at the Apollo is next on my concert agenda: December 19.

What this all says about the black male identity is what makes it really interesting, aside from 50 getting his ass kicked in the only arena (SoundScan) that seems to mean anything to him. Black men in America are conditioned to feel as though the musclebound hard-attitude persona is what makes a black man a black man, and to fall outside that mold is to be… nerdy or oreo or just soft. What Kanye’s success could say is that society is opening up its conceptions of what constitutes a black man. Just maybe.

We (us black men) have been saying all along that we’re not just Stagger Lee and John Henry, but also Duke Ellington, Colin Powell, Prince, James Baldwin, Bob Marley, Bill T. Jones, etc. Whut?

My story boils down to the fact that, at 16, I hated Michael Jackson’s video for “Bad.” The Martin Scorsese-directed one in the faux NYC train station, with the thug life Wesley Snipes and the “you ain’t bad, you ain’t nuthin!” (“Translation: niggas ain’t shit,” Tate later wrote.)

As was MJ’s style for many years, the video debuted on the major networks so families everywhere could settle in with the popcorn and revel in the thing together. MJ fans in their 20s at the time probably lit a spliff in preparation for the 8 o’clock chime. Anyway, 15 minutes later, I hated it. My mother loved it. The clip seemed an obvious repudiation of his blackness and… what was with the pleather and buckles? Mom and Dad liked it; was I bugging?

The next week, The Village Voice dropped (yeah, I was a 16-year-old Voice reader), and “I’m White!” by Greg Tate explained everything about the video that I couldn’t articulate to my folks. I didn’t show them his piece; it was enough that some mysterious cat out there somewhere knew exactly where I was coming from. Like, somebody else besides me gets it.

In my 14 years of cultural criticism, I don’t know that I’ve engendered that feeling in any impressionable teenagers out there over the years. But I’m glad to call Tate a friend these days. We did a reading together at Harlem’s Hue-Man Bookstore last year (above) talking about Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone, and he wiped the floor with me. Of course.